Letter

1 my entire career was spent at computer associates and while I can’t tell you first hand about the pressures in other companies or industries I believe that CA was among the most aggressive in its pursuit of goals, a fact often relayed to me by my industry peers. Both the CEO and myself exerted significant pressure on our teams to meet the goals that we had set for ourselves. As you would expect this has a trickle down effect to others in the organization. While from this perspective performance was measured by internal goals at an executive level these targets were primarily driven by the expectations set by outside parties, primarily the analyze community. While institutional investors were very important, their buy all hold decision were primarily made while relying on analyst information rather than because of direct communication with the company. There were obviously exceptions to this however the above was true the majority of cases. Institutional investors tended not to be as industry vary as the analyst community.

As such being able to demonstrate both an improved financial and competitive performance is critical to success the more transparent these measures were the better.

Decisions made based on information rather than communication with company.

2 my behavior and that of my managers was a direct result of these pressures. Analyst opinion is variety influenced by strategy, nearly always by execution. My focus was almost solely driven by the execution efforts within the business. This obviously extends to organization structures, compensation plans and distribution mechanisms with a strong emphasis on technical execution.

Operator, not decision maker.

3．Culturally at CA you lived on a knife edge. Even at the most senior levels of the business non-performance was not accepted. One thing that does emerge from this is the disparity in performance measurement across various functions. It is obviously easy to measure someone carrying a...